


Go Down Shooting

by walkthegale



Category: InCryptid - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Cryptozoology, Family, Female Friendship, Female Protagonist, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Monsters, Original Character(s), Polyamory, Pregnancy, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 04:56:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1089866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkthegale/pseuds/walkthegale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Science, monsters and revelations. Another ordinary day for the Healy family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Go Down Shooting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tigerbright](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigerbright/gifts).



> The quote at the beginning is from Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire, p151 of the US paperback edition.
> 
> Epic thanks to my wonderful betas!

“Nothing lasts forever. That’s the tragedy and the miracle of existence - that everything is impermanent. Everything changes. All we can do is make the best of the time we have. And go down shooting, naturally.”  
 **\- Enid Healy**  


***

“Uh uh. I’m going. If you get killed, Johnny’ll have my hide for some shiny new boots, pregnant or not. That’s if there’s enough of me left to make a pair of boots when Mr Healy’s done with me.”

Fran glared at Enid across the table, reminding her fiercely of Peggy. Enid wouldn’t be surprised if the girl had some cryptid blood in her line somewhere… Waheela, maybe.

Penned up in a trapper’s hut by a batsquatch (“The what-now?” Fran had said when Enid told her what they were facing. “Gorgons, snake-cats, boundary imps, I can buy, but you’re not telling me that “batsquatch” is a real word.”) whilst tracking an unseasonal jackalope migration, and, Enid felt like she had got to know Fran a lot better in the last twelve hours than during their entire time living in the same house in Buckley. She had already decided that Jonathan had chosen well, that day that she had taken Fran to meet the frickens and the girl had not only taken to them but given them a name of her very own, but this little interlude was definitely cementing that thought.

Now that the sun had risen again, they really needed to get on their way, or, however many food breaks a husk of jackalopes was likely to take, the migration would be over before they caught up with its tail end. Which meant going to check whether the batsquatch was still lurking by the river road.

Enid raised an eyebrow. ”Your concern for my wellbeing is touching, really. And not at all self-serving.”

The corner of Fran’s mouth twitched. “Obviously I’d miss you too.”

“Obviously.”

Fran’s stony expression melted into a grin. “You can be as snooty as you like, I’m still not letting you go out there on your own. I’m not afraid of you any more, and this baby isn’t big enough to stop me yet. I’ll bet you got up to all sorts of trouble when you were pregnant with Johnny.” She jumped up, as though she thought Enid might dash outside and leave her sitting there.

“I miss the days when girls showed proper respect to their future mothers-in-law. I was terrified of mine…” Enid mused cheerfully, getting to her feet and grabbing her shotgun from where it rested against the table leg. “Although that might have had something to do with the way she could take down a lindworm without breaking a sweat.”

“And don’t think you can get any when’s-the-wedding talk in here, either,” Fran pronounced from the doorway.

She definitely reminded Enid of Peggy. Damn.

***

_By unspoken consensus, Enid and Alexander didn’t mention Peggy for almost two years after they arrived in America. Even the mice made sure that her name was never heard outside of their very most private services._

_They talked about everyone else. Parents, grandparents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends - it’s amazing how many people there are in two whole lives, when you’re suddenly not going to see any of them, ever again. They talked about them all, each person, each connection, each family tree, meticulously catalogued and remembered. Each one cried over, time and again._

***

The batsquatch had not gone away.

“I thought you said they were nocturnal?” hissed Fran crossly. “It looks pretty awake to me!”

Enid put a soothing hand on her arm. “Shhh. It’s generally more active at night, but this one has been feeding. A lot.”

They watched it glumly from their hiding place in some thick scrub. It crouched ominously in a tree overlooking the river road, alert and focused, clearly waiting for some more unsuspecting prey to happen along. Unfortunately, based on the pile of very recognisable bones they had stumbled across the previous evening, that prey was going to be the humans that it seemed to have developed a taste for. Presumably it had discovered that they ran away less quickly than most of the other things it could be hunting.

“We do have to kill it, don’t we?” Fran utterly hated killing cryptids these days, even the really dangerous ones – she said it seemed like such a waste, when there were so few of them in the world. It was one of the things that Enid found most endearing about her.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think this one is going to listen if we ask it nicely to please stop eating people.”

Fran pulled her favourite throwing knives from some unseen hiding place under her shirt. “What’s the plan?”

Enid dragged out memories that she’d thought were long gone. “Their hides are tough, but they do have a weak spot – on the back of the neck. Aim for that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

***

_Margaret Alice Healey. Sometimes, late at night, after Alexander had fallen asleep, Enid whispered her name, just to remind herself that yes, she did exist. That the empty space in her chest that once held friends and family had Peggy in it too._

***

Both women leaned against the inside of the hut door, panting. “If Alex and Jonathan could see us now, running scared, they’d think we were a right pair of… ninnies!” Enid exclaimed. “Like treed squirrels, we are.”

“I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Enid caught Fran’s eye, and they both chuckled.

Their laughter was cut off abruptly by the batsquatch slamming into the outside of the door behind them. A scream rang out, almost identical to that of a panther, and the sound of huge, leathery wings dragged across the roof. The thing was massive, strong, and possessed of a lethal set of claws and teeth, but luckily its eyesight wasn’t the best. It could still smell them, inside the hut, but it couldn’t tell, for example, where exactly the door was or that another few blows would probably cave it in.

“Ok,” said Fran, once they had caught their breath. “Going in all guns blazing didn’t work. Any ideas how we’re going to kill this sucker that don’t end with it picking its teeth with our finger bones?”

Enid tucked some loose strands of her hair back into place. “The problem is that last time I came across a batsquatch, I had a kikiyaon with me, and she had wings. Made it a touch easier to get to the back of its neck.”

“Hold up.” The glare was back. “How come you didn’t see fit to tell me you’d fought one before?”

“It was a long time ago, back when Alex and I lived in England. And to tell the truth, I didn’t exactly do any of the fighting – Peggy took it down from above before it had a chance to get near me. If I’d thought the story would be helpful to us here, I’d have…” She trailed off.

“Mrs Healy? Enid?”

Enid looked at her son’s pregnant almost-fiancée. “I have a plan. It’s not a good plan – it’s dangerous and messy and it might not work.”

Fran grinned. “Those are my very favourite kinds of plans.”

***

_They moved around a lot, in those early days. They stayed in what felt like every hotel the immense country had to offer, and, after a while and with a lot of help from the Aeslin, began to get to know a bit about the local cryptid populations._

_For a long time, no one place seemed either safe enough, or right enough, to make themselves a new home._

***

Crawling on her belly in the cramped, filthy, spider-ridden place immediately beneath the roof, Enid cursed herself for her own good sense.

“Are you there yet?” Fran’s voice floated up from below.

“All - ouch. Almost.” Several bits of Enid’s anatomy vied to be the first to remind her that she wasn’t as young as she used to be. She muttered some choice epithets and dragged herself forward another few inches.

“I hope you’re planning to mind that language about the house when little Johnny Junior gets here!”

Enid chose not to rise to the provocation. She felt around above her head and found the edge of the patch of rotten wood that had let rain drip onto them all through the previous night and pushed at it gently. It practically disintegrated under her hand.

“All right,” she called down, barely above a whisper. “We’re good to go. And Frances… Frannie. You be careful now. That’s my grandbaby in there.”

Fran’s voice had moved over to near the door. “Ain’t I always careful?”

And with that, the door banged against its frame, and Fran’s shouts could be heard coming from outside, followed by the snap of vast wings beating against the air and a couple of echoing gunshots. One of them had to go to the roof, and one of them had to be bait. That was the only way this was going to work, and Enid knew and Fran knew, though she’d argued like hell, that in this case, bait was actually safer than the alternative.

That was how Peggy had got the thing last time. Enid had been her bait.

Enid forced her way, as quietly as she could, through a shower of rotten wood splinters, and up onto the roof. Just as they had planned, the batsquatch was being kept completely occupied by Fran’s antics just outside the door of the hut. Fran danced and whooped and dodged, and occasionally lobbed or fired a weapon for good measure, though they all bounced off harmlessly.

Meanwhile, Enid crept down the roof, and on reaching the end, paused to try to gauge the perfect moment - no easy feat with the constant movement below her…

“Mrs Healy,” there was a note of worry in Fran’s tone this time, as she ducked a vicious blow from a claw-tipped forearm. “Could you maybe step it up a little? I’m running a mite low on knives.”

Enid stopped thinking, and launched herself into the air, landing almost perfectly astride the batsquatch’s broad, furry back. It threw back its head and screamed, simultaneously deafening her and smacking her in the face with the back of its neck. The long knife she’d been holding flew from her hand and she reached after it but only clutched at empty air.

She almost panicked then, and had to give herself a firm mental shake, and remind herself that she was a Healy, damn it, and no overgrown bat was going to bring a Healy woman down.

She buried one hand in the coarse fur and clung on, whilst reaching into the back pocket of her jeans with the other. After a couple of missed attempts, as the batsquatch threw itself this way and that, trying to dislodge the unwelcome passenger, she managed to grab hold of one of the revolvers she kept tucked around her body for just such an occasion.

Swinging herself forward with all her remaining strength, she aimed the pistol straight for what she hoped was the weak spot, where the base of its neck met its wing joints, and fired.

The batsquatch dropped like a stone.

***

“Who’s Peggy?”

Several hours later, after some much-needed first-aid, and a meal when Enid realised she was starving, Fran and Enid went about the messy business of burning the batsquatch carcass. It hurt Enid’s inner scientist to lose such a specimen, but they had no way of getting the thing the entire two-days’ walk back to where they’d left the truck so that it wouldn’t scare the jackalope husk they’d been following before all this started. And it wasn’t like they could leave an enormous dead bat creature where just anyone could find it.

So, they went about building a fire, mostly out of bit of the trapper’s hut. And at that point Fran, who wasn’t exactly known for her circumspection, simply couldn’t hold in her questions any more.

Enid sighed. “Peggy was… our wife. Mine and Alex’s. Not by law, obviously, but in every other way.” She looked up from the armful of broken planks she was carrying and met Fran’s gaze with a challenge in her eyes.

Fran was silent for a moment, then, “Does Johnny know?”

“Yes, but he wouldn’t have told you. He’s a good boy and he knows… that some things are other people’s secrets to keep or tell.”

Another moment’s thought. “Well, I’m pregnant and I’m not even married to one person, so who’m I to judge if you used to be married to two.” She smiled. “Sounds kinda fun, truth be told, though I’ll bet it made for double the squabbling too.”

Enid smiled back at her. Yes, Johnny had done better for himself than she’d ever dared hope he would.

Fran frowned suddenly. “You said you knew Peggy back in England. I thought you and Mr Healy were both members of the Covenant of Holy Sticks Up Their Asses About Monsters before you came over here. They can’t have thought much of that.”

“No,” Enid put down her pile of firewood and stretched. “No, they really wouldn’t have. Fortunately they didn’t know - they thought she was my long lost cousin who’d fallen on hard times. And they didn’t know that Peggy was half kikiyaon, although neither did we, at first. A kikiyaon is like an owl-person, a bird shapeshifter,” she added, off Fran’s confused look.

“Anyway,” she continued. “Finding out about Peggy’s heritage was a bit of a surprise to us. Luckily, we were already well on the path that led to us breaking from the Covenant, and Peggy… she just helped us along the way. And having a spy on the inside of the Covenant of St George was no small thing for her people.”

“What… I meant to say… did Peggy…?”

Enid didn’t often see Fran lost for words. “No, dear. Peggy didn’t die. We had to leave the country in something of a hurry, in the end, and she chose to stay behind. She had a duty to her people there, and being a shapeshifter, she was much better able to hide herself from Covenant agents than Alex or I would have been.”

“Oh,” Fran smiled. “Good. That she isn’t dead.”

“We hope she isn’t. News doesn’t always travel very fast, and we haven’t had any in a close on three years. The last we heard, she was heading a group of like-minded cryptids, all working to undermine the Covenant’s hold in Europe. We think they might have been based somewhere in Germany, but it’s hard to tell.” Enid picked up her firewood again. “She was never one to take the status quo lying down. A bit like some other people I’ve met since.”

***

_That was why they settled in Michigan, in the end. A group of mice who had been out scouting the area returned, looking triumphant and a little afraid, to tell their Patient Priestess and God of Uncommon Sense, that they had found the people of the Indomitable Priestess._

_It transpired that a group of kikiyaon had settled on the edge of the woods near to Buckley Township, and just occasionally, through the sort of communication routes known only to those who have spent their lives needing to hide, they could get word through of Peggy._

_And Enid and Alexander Healy rebuilt their lives, very differently to how they had lived before._

***

Enid wondered if Fran would ask the mice for more details when they got home. She found that she didn’t think she’d mind if she did.

They watched the batsquatch burn, until there was nothing left but unidentifiable bone fragments, then packed up their equipment and headed on down the river road after the jackalopes.


End file.
